New on PHPBuilder.com today there's a tutorial from Jason Gilmore about running Zend Framework-based applications from the command line in a more hard-coded way than using Zend_Tool.

I regularly use an alternative application of PHP and I'm quite surprised that this capability remains relatively unknown. I'm referring to the ability to run PHP scripts from the command line using its command line interpreter (CLI). Even though it's been possible since the PHP 4.3.0 release, you may be completely unaware of this CLI usage unless you employ great tools such as PHPDoc, Phing, or PHPUnit. Running PHP scripts with CLI allows you to leverage your PHP language skills whenever you need to run scripts from the shell.

He talks about what the CLI functionality of PHP is and what it has to offer the developer. He then creates a few sample scripts so you can get a feel for how to write and run simple PHP CLI applications. Building on these examples, he creates a Zend Framework-based script that loads in the bootstrap, grabs configuration values and makes a connection to the Amazon Web Services.